Last evening

While walking east on the dirt road, running past the house I grew up in, several animals caught my attention. Headed down to where I remember a wooden bridge over a gully a young eagle was circling. She was, I’m certain watching below her for a rattler

Unfortunately, she was also circling low over a juniper where A couple Clark’s Nutcrackers had been nesting. Those two began accosting the young eagle from behind. Struggling to keep behind the predator they attack her repeatedly. Of course neither of them intended any more than distracting the young female from their empty nest. All the swirls, dives and climbs coming out of those three were elegant.

Finally the young eagle circled away from the juniper the birds were defending. Assuming I’d caught sight of the highlight of the evening I turn around and walked back up the short hill. Passing between a corn field and sorghum on the other I scared a couple of Quail out of the cane field. A few steps further and I heard scuttering under the foot tall cane and then a dozen or so hatchlings took flight. Even the smallest of them made the frenzied flight across the road ahead of me and into the tall corn.

Walking on back to the house to check on mom and dad a two pointer buck who’d not begun to rub the felt from those new horns bolted across the road from my left. He wasn’t more than 20 feet in front me me as he crossed and dove into the corn. His head and horns were were the last of what I saw blend into the field.

Quietly walking a dozen more steps to the dirt driveway I hopefully glance off to my right. Sure enough, the young buck’s butt was toward me and he’d already gone back to grazing. Rather than watching him too long and getting him to bolt off into the field, again, I kept walking onto the drive making him disappear.

Beauty can claim us in simple ways and took hold of me thrice this evening.

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About the author

Before 1999 I was active in mental health doing assessments, emergency interventions, psychotherapy, domestic violence group treatment, and consulting in the foster care system. Rapidly, in 1999 I was lovingly shoved in disability because of temporal lobe epilepsy. Then, in June of 2001 my left temporal lobe was chucked into a trashcan. Since then, I have been playing at reconfiguring the who I had been. I just have too many spare parts still strewn across the floor.